Dr. Deborah Ascher Barnstone Professor Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building University of Technology, Sydney PO Box 123 Broadway NSW 2007 AUSTRALIA +61 2 9514 8111 [email protected] Bruno Taut and the First World War ABSTRACT It is commonly held that the experience of the First World War altered the course of avant-garde art and architecture in the Weimar period. Yet there were different experiences of the war; and the avant-garde was not a monolithic group either before 1914 or afterwards. Few histories discuss specific connections between the events of 1914-1918 and the explosion of creative activity that began as early as 1917 then continued through the 1920s. Yet by all accounts the war was a formative experience with a strong effect on all who lived through it whether seen from the vantage point of trenches along the Western Front, the Prisoner of War camps in East Prussia, or the increasingly pressured cities and towns at home. This essay traces the war experience and postwar response of the important German architect, Bruno Taut, who called the war “an epidemic of mental disorder.” Taut was a leading anti-war activist/agitator who experienced the war on the home front in Magdeburg and was a founding member of many postwar avant-garde groups. The 1914 Cologne pavilion, done with Paul Scheerbart, might prefigure what was to come. However, Taut’s work took a radical turn during the war. From the uninspired pragmatism of Falkenberg (1913) he turned to the fantasy and speculation of Alpine Architecture (1919). KEYWORDS German Architecture, The Great War Impact, German Avant-garde
Bruno Taut and the First World War
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Microsoft Word - Atiner 2014 Bruno Taut and the First World War.docxBroadway NSW 2007 AUSTRALIA
+61 2 9514 8111 [email protected]
Bruno Taut and the First World War ABSTRACT It is commonly held that the experience of the First World War altered the course of avant-garde art and architecture in the Weimar period. Yet there were different experiences of the war; and the avant-garde was not a monolithic group either before 1914 or afterwards. Few histories discuss specific connections between the events of 1914-1918 and the explosion of creative activity that began as early as 1917 then continued through the 1920s. Yet by all accounts the war was a formative experience with a strong effect on all who lived through it whether seen from the vantage point of trenches along the Western Front, the Prisoner of War camps in East Prussia, or the increasingly pressured cities and towns at home. This essay traces the war experience and postwar response of the important German architect, Bruno Taut, who called the war “an epidemic of mental disorder.” Taut was a leading anti-war activist/agitator who experienced the war on the home front in Magdeburg and was a founding member of many postwar avant-garde groups. The 1914 Cologne pavilion, done with Paul Scheerbart, might prefigure what was to come. However, Taut’s work took a radical turn during the war. From the uninspired pragmatism of Falkenberg (1913) he turned to the fantasy and speculation of Alpine Architecture (1919). KEYWORDS German Architecture, The Great War Impact, German Avant-garde
Bruno Taut and the First World War
"The First World War was ended. Jugendstil, and copying of historic styles in building had been abandoned earlier. Still, many believed and treasured [the idea] that something new had to come after the collapse." The architect, Max Taut, brother of the more famous Bruno Taut, penned these words looking back on the period in 1918 and 1919 just as Germany sat at the edge of war and revolution. Not only did Taut describe the effect the war had had on many architects and artists but also the general feeling amongst their fellow countrymen. His brief account dates to the 1960s but also reflects the feelings held by many of his contemporaries from 1914 onwards regardless of the political, or artistic orientation. War must lead to disaster and collapse then to renewal otherwise the war was in vain. Bruno Taut articulated what he viewed to be the expectations for architecture: it should show the “particular consequences arising from the War.”1
It is commonly held that the experience of the First World War altered the course of avant-garde art and architecture in the Weimar period. Nevertheless there were many different experiences of the war and therefore many different consequences; the avant-garde was not a monolithic group either before 1914 or afterwards. Few histories discuss specific connections between the events of 1914-1918 and the explosion of creative activity that began as early as 1917 then continued through the 1920s. Certainly the motivations driving the many artists and architects in the Novembergruppe, Arbeitsrat für Kunst, Gläserne Kette, and other radical groups were as diverse as the experiences these artists had during the war. Yet by all accounts the war was a formative experience with a strong effect on all who lived through it whether seen from the vantage point of trenches along the Western Front, the Prisoner of War camps in East Prussia, or the increasingly pressured cities and towns at home. Although Taut asserted that the “particular consequences arising from the War” should inform architectural expression, he conveniently sidestepped any explanation of what this means for himself or for his contemporaries.
1 Bruno Taut, “Kriegs-Ehrung,” Kunstgewerbeblatt, 1915, 174.
Figure 1: Am Falkenberg development (1913-1916)
In Taut’s case, the war experience seems to have given him license to intensify the more radical aspects of his work; the aesthetics temporarily become fantastic and utopian and the social project becomes extreme. From the uninspired architectural pragmatism of Falkenberg (1913), that was steeped in conventional social improvement aspirations, Taut turned to the fantasy and speculation of Alpine Architecture (1919), the City Crown (1919), Architecture for a New Community (1920), and the Dissolution of the Cities (1920). (Figure 1) Of special interest here is Alpine Architecture because Taut considered Alpine Architecture an anti-war manifesto; the communities and architecture he envisioned are not only ideal but also respond in very pragmatic ways to conditions caused by the First World War. Taut uses Alpine Architecture as an antidote to war. Build rather than destroy, is part of the tract’s message, but also Alpine Architecture presents construction of utopian communities as the alternate channel for the human impulses and energy expended on war. At the same time, the project presents an alternative world to the reader, one where problems, like war and conflict, will be eradicated by the effort required to construct the spectacular architecture and by the sheer wonder that architecture and the natural landscape in which it is situated will instil in people.
Taut was certainly a pacifist. He railed against the war, calling it a “wicked ghost,” “hopeless stultification,” and “an epidemic of mental disorder.”2 Unlike many other German youths who rushed to enlist during the heady August Days of 1914, Taut held back. Rather than a moment of progress that would usher in a new order, both social and artistic, Taut saw 2 Bruno Taut, from the unpublished preface to Alpine Architecture ALP.01.42, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (hereinafter AdK).
the war as folly and madness.3 It is true that on several occasions his correspondence from 1914-1916 includes the official patriotic line about the war. But these instances were rare and the partisan language formulaic and typical, which suggests that Taut may have felt compelled to use it. Or perhaps he was not initially certain how he felt about the war. By 1916, however, Taut was avowedly anti-war.
Born in 1880, he was 34 years old when the war broke out, so he should have enlisted. However somehow he managed to avoid both volunteering for the war effort and conscription. He seems to have successfully used a couple of strategies to stay out of the war. He moved around a great deal, which made him more difficult to track, and he had himself pronounced “indispensable” to the manufacturers who employed him; this gave Taut an argument against conscription. He claimed to be more useful to the war effort at home than he would have been on the front. In 1916, when he was most fearful of conscription, Taut mounted a hunger strike to make himself physically unfit to serve and thereby avoid being called up.4
At the outbreak of war, Taut travelled from Berlin to Kattowitz in Upper Silesia where the Hohenlohe Works employed him to design and construct two employee housing projects: the Städische Kolonie Oheimgrube and the Werksiedlung Oheim-grube. Both extend the work Taut had already done on housing before the war. They are simple blocks with small ornamental flourishes and efficient spatial planning. In October of 1915 he took a position in Brandenburg at a powder factory. Then he moved to Bergisch-Gladbach where he was declared indispensable to his employer, the Stella Works furnace factory. Thus, Taut passed the war years in different parts of Germany working for large industrial concerns. He was separated from his wife, Helga, during the period, living what sounds like a fairly lonely existence until he met Erica Wittich, who became his second wife. The work he was forced to do was unremarkable and uninspired.5 It was the polar opposite of what he would begin to create around 1917.
Although his early projects were not daring or unusual in their expression, Taut was interested, even obsessed, with discovering a new expression for architecture from the beginning of his career.6 It seems that Taut’s personal search for new expression had three sides to it: pure aesthetics, the social, and the natural. All three interests have origins before the First World War when he started to work intensively on small houses and industrial buildings; he saw in these new programmatic types the
3 As Iain Boyd Whyte shows in his study, Taut seems to have been passionately anti-war from the start, in spite of a condolence letter he wrote to his sister-in-law Charlotte Wollgast in 1914 that was riddled with war clichés. Iain Boyd Whyte, Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), 43-44. 4 Whyte, 44. 5 Schirren, Bruno Taut: Alpine Architektur. A Utopia; Bruno Taut: 1880-1938 Architekt zwischen Tradition u. Avantgarde eds. Winfried Nerdinger, Kristiana Hartmann, Matthias Schirren, Manfred Speidel (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. 2001), Kristiana Hartmann, Matthias Schirren, and Manfred Speidel (Stuttgart: DVA,2001). 6 See Brigitte Renate Vera Lamberts, Das Fruhwerk von Bruno Taut (1900-1914), diss. University of Bonn, 1994, 107-117; and Barbara Volkmann.
answer to the 19th century dilemma of styles and the correct area on which contemporary architects should focus.7 For a time, Taut was convinced that the principle goal for design had to be the combination of function, or program, and solution, and that by focusing on these two aspects of design, a new aesthetic for architecture would emerge that was the - ”practical and aesthetic as a unity.”8 During this period, Taut also became increasingly interested in architecture as an instrument for social good rather than merely an object with a socially conscious program.9 Taut gradually shifted his method of work, however, between 1915 and 1917. From using innovative architectural program to generate originality in his designs he turned to inventing new forms as the means of effectively implementing experimental architectural program.
Taut reveals the new direction his thinking is taking in a virtually unknown tract written and published in 1913 called, “A Necessity.”10 In the article, Taut uses Kandinsky’s paintings as an example of the direction in which architects must go. Kandinsky’s work in 1912-1913 had moved into abstraction; the canvases are full of vibrant colour, animated lines and forms, and composed without recognizable objects or spatial relationships. Taut asserts that like Kandinsky and other contemporary artists, architects must achieve “freedom from perspective and single vantage points…the buildings of great architectural eras were invented without perspective….”11 Taut blames the over concern with perspective for trapping architects in a mode of thinking that produces flat, “backdrop” buildings rather than spatial experience. “Architecture,” he writes, “should have rooms whose characteristic phenomena come from the new art…light compositions of Delaunay…Cubist rhythms….”12 In other words, he is searching for a way to develop new space and form. He recognizes that painting has made advances that suggest some paths forward for architecture. Taut is not yet really sure what this new architecture might look like or how to achieve it. He also calls for “religiosity” in design work, which seems to mean “passion” and “conviction.” In spite of the fervour, Taut wishes to see behind design; he is realistic in his expectations. He understands art as “…the tensions between the ideas, the means, and the reality.”13 This view suggests a pragmatic notion of art as the result of the artist’s struggle to mediate between the three parts of his work: the ideas and the constraints on those ideas and the means with which the ideas are realized. It therefore follows that as the ideas behind the architecture change the forms will change. In fact, this is precisely what occurred in Taut’s work.
At this time Taut’s thinking seems to swing radically away from social concerns to architecture as pure art “Every thought of social 7 Bruno Taut, “Kleinhausbau und Landaufschliessung vom Standpunkt des Architekten,” Gartenstadt: Mitteilungen der deutschen Gartenstadtgesellschaft, JG8, Heft 1, 9-12. 8 Bruno Taut, “Die Neue Wohnung (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1924), 95. 9 Barbara Volkmann, Bruno Taut 1880-1938. Ausstellung der Akademie der Künste vom 29. Juni bis 3. August 1980. (Berlin: AdK,1980). 10 Bruno Taut, “Eine Notwendigkeit,” Der Sturm, No. 196, 1913, 174-175. 11 Ibid 174. 12 Ibid,175. 13 Bruno Taut, “Baugedanken der Gegenwart,” Die Bauwelt, 1923, 341.
intentions should be avoided,” he writes. The assertion is strange since, as Iain Boyd Whyte points out in Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism from a young age Taut was a committed reformist with a particular interest in social housing and the relationship between landscape and architecture. He was a member of the Choriner Kreis, a precursor to the nature groups of the 1920s, speculated on the relationship between architecture and nature from early on, and involved himself with the Deutsche Gartengesellschaft (German Garden Association), the organization that promoted garden city and similar green schemes.14 In fact, Taut’s early large-scale developments like Am Falkenberg in Berlin and Reform in Magdeburg (1913) were garden city proposals with strong social agendas behind the designs. They were not, however, formally innovative.
Taut had an abiding admiration for Gothic architecture, which he saw as an example of the pinnacle of artistic collaboration and creativity along with communal involvement.15 After the war, Taut calls for the consolidation of the arts under the umbrella of architecture and uses the design and construction of the Gothic cathedral as the paradigm. But the Gothic is important for other reasons. It was a spiritual architecture; the cathedral space was exhilarating to enter; the interior was bathed in coloured light; and it was the primary communal social space in the Middle Ages. Taut read the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart enthusiastically and was also fascinated by the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner, philosopher/physicist. Taut likely was most attracted to Fechner’s theory of pan-psychism, the belief that all of nature has a soul and is sentient. Taut argues that Gothic architecture, like all great buildings, evokes sensations of awe and wonder similar to those triggered in nature.16
As early as 1913, he published a tract lamenting the lack of direction in contemporary architecture and filled with ideas for how to develop a new style.17 In the piece, Taut postulates that the single biggest challenge for the architect is to embody the Zeitgeist in building. Taut uses the Gothic and Baroque as examples of two eras whose architecture he believes successfully reflected the ethos of the period.
Two projects from 1913 and 1914 are evidence of the aesthetic and formal struggles Taut was engaged with at the time: the 1913 Monument to Steel at the International Building Exposition in Leipzig and the 1914 Glass Pavilion at the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne. (Figures 2 & 3) The historian Iain Boyd Whyte labels Taut’s struggle as one between “the demands of function and simplicity on the one hand, and aesthetic delight and artistic fantasy on the other.”18 In both the Monument to Steel and the Glass Pavilion, Taut is clearly experimenting with form. The projects show Taut’s interest in “light” and “Cubist form” yet they use them in fairly conventional ways within the parameters of contemporary German design
14 Whyte, Bruno Taut, 7-8. 15 Bruno Taut, “Eine Notwendigkeit,” Der Sturm, No. 196, 1913, 174-175. 16 Bruno Taut, “Natur und Baukunst,” Stuttgart, 1904. 17 Bruno Taut, “Kleinhausbau und Landsaufschliessung vom Standpunkt des Architekten,” Gartenstadt: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gartenstadtgesellschaft, 8 Jg, Heft 1, 1914, 9-12. 18 Whyte, Bruno Taut, 29.
by architects like Peter Behrens.19 The monument is a four-tiered octagon, which the famous architecture critic Adolf Behne considered “Cubist.” Each tier is smaller than the one below so that the volume sets back as it rises off the ground. A gigantic gold sphere sits inside the uppermost openwork lattice tier quite like the dome atop the Cologne Glass Pavilion, only smaller and spherical. It recalls Joseph Maria Olbrich’s Secession Building in Vienna as well as other historical domes. The tiers are ringed bands of floor- to-ceiling windows making the interior as filled with natural light as possible. Taut placed exposed steel columns on the outside and inside to advertise the pavilion’s function, as a showcase for steel construction. At each level, inscriptions wrap around the building. The inscriptions list steel structures like bridges and factories and also list the names of professional steelworkers groups like the Steel Mill Association. In plan, the monument is symmetrical and centrally organized with an inner space surrounded by a ring of open space. The structure therefore anticipates the Cologne Pavilion in several formal moves.
Figure 2: Monument to Steel (1913)
19 Kai Gutschow, “From Object to Installation in Bruno Taut’s Exhibit Pavilions,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 59, Issue 4, May 2006, 63-71.
Adolf Behne acknowledges Taut’s monument design for its appeal
to the emotions, “innovative approach,” use of primal forms and reliance on inner fantasy.20 In spite of Behne’s opinion, the monument uses familiar forms albeit in a strange arrangement. It is in his recognition of the debt Taut owes to fantasy that Behne’s appraisal is most useful; in its use of the octagonal plan, stacked and set back layers, and expressed steel, the monument departs from conventional form-making and shows that Taut is searching for a new formal language. Figure 3: Glass Pavilion, Cologne Werkbund Exhibition (1914)
Taut’s breakthrough project was the 1914 Glass House designed in collaboration with the German mystical writer and pacifist Paul Scheerbart.21 Taut had met Scheerbart through Gottfried Heinersdorff, who was the Artistic Head of the Glasmalerei-Werkstaetten, Puhl and Wagner, Berlin.22 Both men were involved in Der Sturm, one of the important prewar avant-garde movements in Germany. A central feature of Der Sturm was the search for new social and artistic forms as well as new purpose for both society and art.
Taut found Scheerbart’s philosophy attractive on many levels and would be influenced by the older man throughout his career. The Glass Pavilion was a quasi-mystical construction that celebrated glass as an
20 Adolf Behne, “Das Monument des Eisens,” Allgemeiner Beobachter 3, no. 12, October 1913, 167; Behne, “Das Monument des Eisens,” Kunstgewerbeblatt, 25, no. 5, February 1914, 86-88. 21 Paul Scheerbarts Briefe von 1913-1914 an Gottfried Heinersdorff, Bruno Taut und Herwarth Walden ed. Leo Ikelaar (Paderborn: Igel, 1996). 22 Bruno Taut: 1880-1938 Architekt zwischen Tradition u. Avantgarde, 299.
architectural material and, with its coloured glass pieces, harkened back to the stained glass of the Gothic cathedral. Whether Taut became a pacifist because of Scheerbart or was attracted to Scheerbart in part because of his strong pacifist views is not clear, but the two were both vehemently anti- war.
The ideas driving the design of the Glass Pavilion had utopian ambitions, as Paul Scheerbart’s rhyming couplets demonstrate: “Coloured glass destroys hatred,” “Glass brings us the new time: brick culture only makes us sorry.” Although groundbreaking in many ways the pavilion is also awkward. Its use of coloured glass on as many surfaces as possible and its unusual formal resolution mark the pavilion as a unique project for the time that demonstrates, as Taut claimed, the as-yet unexplored possibilities inherent in glass construction.23 But when compared with the compositional freedoms of the fine art Taut admired, the pavilion seems timid. It is a perfect circle, symmetrical, static, and centrally focused. The oddly shaped dome sits uncomfortably on the reinforced concrete frame below, which has a similarly disjunctive relationship to the concrete base. While the form is unusual, it still remains stubbornly in the realm of a familiar form recalling cathedrals, Orthodox churches, and mosques. This is likely partly because of the real and obvious constraints associated with any architectural design project but also, perhaps, because Taut could not extricate himself from known forms.
Taut’s short piece, “War Ceremony,” from 1915, reveals a shift in his thinking during the war. In the essay, he makes a very persuasive argument against the design and construction of war monuments as a legitimate way for architects to occupy themselves during the war in favour of the design and construction of useful…
+61 2 9514 8111 [email protected]
Bruno Taut and the First World War ABSTRACT It is commonly held that the experience of the First World War altered the course of avant-garde art and architecture in the Weimar period. Yet there were different experiences of the war; and the avant-garde was not a monolithic group either before 1914 or afterwards. Few histories discuss specific connections between the events of 1914-1918 and the explosion of creative activity that began as early as 1917 then continued through the 1920s. Yet by all accounts the war was a formative experience with a strong effect on all who lived through it whether seen from the vantage point of trenches along the Western Front, the Prisoner of War camps in East Prussia, or the increasingly pressured cities and towns at home. This essay traces the war experience and postwar response of the important German architect, Bruno Taut, who called the war “an epidemic of mental disorder.” Taut was a leading anti-war activist/agitator who experienced the war on the home front in Magdeburg and was a founding member of many postwar avant-garde groups. The 1914 Cologne pavilion, done with Paul Scheerbart, might prefigure what was to come. However, Taut’s work took a radical turn during the war. From the uninspired pragmatism of Falkenberg (1913) he turned to the fantasy and speculation of Alpine Architecture (1919). KEYWORDS German Architecture, The Great War Impact, German Avant-garde
Bruno Taut and the First World War
"The First World War was ended. Jugendstil, and copying of historic styles in building had been abandoned earlier. Still, many believed and treasured [the idea] that something new had to come after the collapse." The architect, Max Taut, brother of the more famous Bruno Taut, penned these words looking back on the period in 1918 and 1919 just as Germany sat at the edge of war and revolution. Not only did Taut describe the effect the war had had on many architects and artists but also the general feeling amongst their fellow countrymen. His brief account dates to the 1960s but also reflects the feelings held by many of his contemporaries from 1914 onwards regardless of the political, or artistic orientation. War must lead to disaster and collapse then to renewal otherwise the war was in vain. Bruno Taut articulated what he viewed to be the expectations for architecture: it should show the “particular consequences arising from the War.”1
It is commonly held that the experience of the First World War altered the course of avant-garde art and architecture in the Weimar period. Nevertheless there were many different experiences of the war and therefore many different consequences; the avant-garde was not a monolithic group either before 1914 or afterwards. Few histories discuss specific connections between the events of 1914-1918 and the explosion of creative activity that began as early as 1917 then continued through the 1920s. Certainly the motivations driving the many artists and architects in the Novembergruppe, Arbeitsrat für Kunst, Gläserne Kette, and other radical groups were as diverse as the experiences these artists had during the war. Yet by all accounts the war was a formative experience with a strong effect on all who lived through it whether seen from the vantage point of trenches along the Western Front, the Prisoner of War camps in East Prussia, or the increasingly pressured cities and towns at home. Although Taut asserted that the “particular consequences arising from the War” should inform architectural expression, he conveniently sidestepped any explanation of what this means for himself or for his contemporaries.
1 Bruno Taut, “Kriegs-Ehrung,” Kunstgewerbeblatt, 1915, 174.
Figure 1: Am Falkenberg development (1913-1916)
In Taut’s case, the war experience seems to have given him license to intensify the more radical aspects of his work; the aesthetics temporarily become fantastic and utopian and the social project becomes extreme. From the uninspired architectural pragmatism of Falkenberg (1913), that was steeped in conventional social improvement aspirations, Taut turned to the fantasy and speculation of Alpine Architecture (1919), the City Crown (1919), Architecture for a New Community (1920), and the Dissolution of the Cities (1920). (Figure 1) Of special interest here is Alpine Architecture because Taut considered Alpine Architecture an anti-war manifesto; the communities and architecture he envisioned are not only ideal but also respond in very pragmatic ways to conditions caused by the First World War. Taut uses Alpine Architecture as an antidote to war. Build rather than destroy, is part of the tract’s message, but also Alpine Architecture presents construction of utopian communities as the alternate channel for the human impulses and energy expended on war. At the same time, the project presents an alternative world to the reader, one where problems, like war and conflict, will be eradicated by the effort required to construct the spectacular architecture and by the sheer wonder that architecture and the natural landscape in which it is situated will instil in people.
Taut was certainly a pacifist. He railed against the war, calling it a “wicked ghost,” “hopeless stultification,” and “an epidemic of mental disorder.”2 Unlike many other German youths who rushed to enlist during the heady August Days of 1914, Taut held back. Rather than a moment of progress that would usher in a new order, both social and artistic, Taut saw 2 Bruno Taut, from the unpublished preface to Alpine Architecture ALP.01.42, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (hereinafter AdK).
the war as folly and madness.3 It is true that on several occasions his correspondence from 1914-1916 includes the official patriotic line about the war. But these instances were rare and the partisan language formulaic and typical, which suggests that Taut may have felt compelled to use it. Or perhaps he was not initially certain how he felt about the war. By 1916, however, Taut was avowedly anti-war.
Born in 1880, he was 34 years old when the war broke out, so he should have enlisted. However somehow he managed to avoid both volunteering for the war effort and conscription. He seems to have successfully used a couple of strategies to stay out of the war. He moved around a great deal, which made him more difficult to track, and he had himself pronounced “indispensable” to the manufacturers who employed him; this gave Taut an argument against conscription. He claimed to be more useful to the war effort at home than he would have been on the front. In 1916, when he was most fearful of conscription, Taut mounted a hunger strike to make himself physically unfit to serve and thereby avoid being called up.4
At the outbreak of war, Taut travelled from Berlin to Kattowitz in Upper Silesia where the Hohenlohe Works employed him to design and construct two employee housing projects: the Städische Kolonie Oheimgrube and the Werksiedlung Oheim-grube. Both extend the work Taut had already done on housing before the war. They are simple blocks with small ornamental flourishes and efficient spatial planning. In October of 1915 he took a position in Brandenburg at a powder factory. Then he moved to Bergisch-Gladbach where he was declared indispensable to his employer, the Stella Works furnace factory. Thus, Taut passed the war years in different parts of Germany working for large industrial concerns. He was separated from his wife, Helga, during the period, living what sounds like a fairly lonely existence until he met Erica Wittich, who became his second wife. The work he was forced to do was unremarkable and uninspired.5 It was the polar opposite of what he would begin to create around 1917.
Although his early projects were not daring or unusual in their expression, Taut was interested, even obsessed, with discovering a new expression for architecture from the beginning of his career.6 It seems that Taut’s personal search for new expression had three sides to it: pure aesthetics, the social, and the natural. All three interests have origins before the First World War when he started to work intensively on small houses and industrial buildings; he saw in these new programmatic types the
3 As Iain Boyd Whyte shows in his study, Taut seems to have been passionately anti-war from the start, in spite of a condolence letter he wrote to his sister-in-law Charlotte Wollgast in 1914 that was riddled with war clichés. Iain Boyd Whyte, Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), 43-44. 4 Whyte, 44. 5 Schirren, Bruno Taut: Alpine Architektur. A Utopia; Bruno Taut: 1880-1938 Architekt zwischen Tradition u. Avantgarde eds. Winfried Nerdinger, Kristiana Hartmann, Matthias Schirren, Manfred Speidel (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. 2001), Kristiana Hartmann, Matthias Schirren, and Manfred Speidel (Stuttgart: DVA,2001). 6 See Brigitte Renate Vera Lamberts, Das Fruhwerk von Bruno Taut (1900-1914), diss. University of Bonn, 1994, 107-117; and Barbara Volkmann.
answer to the 19th century dilemma of styles and the correct area on which contemporary architects should focus.7 For a time, Taut was convinced that the principle goal for design had to be the combination of function, or program, and solution, and that by focusing on these two aspects of design, a new aesthetic for architecture would emerge that was the - ”practical and aesthetic as a unity.”8 During this period, Taut also became increasingly interested in architecture as an instrument for social good rather than merely an object with a socially conscious program.9 Taut gradually shifted his method of work, however, between 1915 and 1917. From using innovative architectural program to generate originality in his designs he turned to inventing new forms as the means of effectively implementing experimental architectural program.
Taut reveals the new direction his thinking is taking in a virtually unknown tract written and published in 1913 called, “A Necessity.”10 In the article, Taut uses Kandinsky’s paintings as an example of the direction in which architects must go. Kandinsky’s work in 1912-1913 had moved into abstraction; the canvases are full of vibrant colour, animated lines and forms, and composed without recognizable objects or spatial relationships. Taut asserts that like Kandinsky and other contemporary artists, architects must achieve “freedom from perspective and single vantage points…the buildings of great architectural eras were invented without perspective….”11 Taut blames the over concern with perspective for trapping architects in a mode of thinking that produces flat, “backdrop” buildings rather than spatial experience. “Architecture,” he writes, “should have rooms whose characteristic phenomena come from the new art…light compositions of Delaunay…Cubist rhythms….”12 In other words, he is searching for a way to develop new space and form. He recognizes that painting has made advances that suggest some paths forward for architecture. Taut is not yet really sure what this new architecture might look like or how to achieve it. He also calls for “religiosity” in design work, which seems to mean “passion” and “conviction.” In spite of the fervour, Taut wishes to see behind design; he is realistic in his expectations. He understands art as “…the tensions between the ideas, the means, and the reality.”13 This view suggests a pragmatic notion of art as the result of the artist’s struggle to mediate between the three parts of his work: the ideas and the constraints on those ideas and the means with which the ideas are realized. It therefore follows that as the ideas behind the architecture change the forms will change. In fact, this is precisely what occurred in Taut’s work.
At this time Taut’s thinking seems to swing radically away from social concerns to architecture as pure art “Every thought of social 7 Bruno Taut, “Kleinhausbau und Landaufschliessung vom Standpunkt des Architekten,” Gartenstadt: Mitteilungen der deutschen Gartenstadtgesellschaft, JG8, Heft 1, 9-12. 8 Bruno Taut, “Die Neue Wohnung (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1924), 95. 9 Barbara Volkmann, Bruno Taut 1880-1938. Ausstellung der Akademie der Künste vom 29. Juni bis 3. August 1980. (Berlin: AdK,1980). 10 Bruno Taut, “Eine Notwendigkeit,” Der Sturm, No. 196, 1913, 174-175. 11 Ibid 174. 12 Ibid,175. 13 Bruno Taut, “Baugedanken der Gegenwart,” Die Bauwelt, 1923, 341.
intentions should be avoided,” he writes. The assertion is strange since, as Iain Boyd Whyte points out in Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism from a young age Taut was a committed reformist with a particular interest in social housing and the relationship between landscape and architecture. He was a member of the Choriner Kreis, a precursor to the nature groups of the 1920s, speculated on the relationship between architecture and nature from early on, and involved himself with the Deutsche Gartengesellschaft (German Garden Association), the organization that promoted garden city and similar green schemes.14 In fact, Taut’s early large-scale developments like Am Falkenberg in Berlin and Reform in Magdeburg (1913) were garden city proposals with strong social agendas behind the designs. They were not, however, formally innovative.
Taut had an abiding admiration for Gothic architecture, which he saw as an example of the pinnacle of artistic collaboration and creativity along with communal involvement.15 After the war, Taut calls for the consolidation of the arts under the umbrella of architecture and uses the design and construction of the Gothic cathedral as the paradigm. But the Gothic is important for other reasons. It was a spiritual architecture; the cathedral space was exhilarating to enter; the interior was bathed in coloured light; and it was the primary communal social space in the Middle Ages. Taut read the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart enthusiastically and was also fascinated by the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner, philosopher/physicist. Taut likely was most attracted to Fechner’s theory of pan-psychism, the belief that all of nature has a soul and is sentient. Taut argues that Gothic architecture, like all great buildings, evokes sensations of awe and wonder similar to those triggered in nature.16
As early as 1913, he published a tract lamenting the lack of direction in contemporary architecture and filled with ideas for how to develop a new style.17 In the piece, Taut postulates that the single biggest challenge for the architect is to embody the Zeitgeist in building. Taut uses the Gothic and Baroque as examples of two eras whose architecture he believes successfully reflected the ethos of the period.
Two projects from 1913 and 1914 are evidence of the aesthetic and formal struggles Taut was engaged with at the time: the 1913 Monument to Steel at the International Building Exposition in Leipzig and the 1914 Glass Pavilion at the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne. (Figures 2 & 3) The historian Iain Boyd Whyte labels Taut’s struggle as one between “the demands of function and simplicity on the one hand, and aesthetic delight and artistic fantasy on the other.”18 In both the Monument to Steel and the Glass Pavilion, Taut is clearly experimenting with form. The projects show Taut’s interest in “light” and “Cubist form” yet they use them in fairly conventional ways within the parameters of contemporary German design
14 Whyte, Bruno Taut, 7-8. 15 Bruno Taut, “Eine Notwendigkeit,” Der Sturm, No. 196, 1913, 174-175. 16 Bruno Taut, “Natur und Baukunst,” Stuttgart, 1904. 17 Bruno Taut, “Kleinhausbau und Landsaufschliessung vom Standpunkt des Architekten,” Gartenstadt: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gartenstadtgesellschaft, 8 Jg, Heft 1, 1914, 9-12. 18 Whyte, Bruno Taut, 29.
by architects like Peter Behrens.19 The monument is a four-tiered octagon, which the famous architecture critic Adolf Behne considered “Cubist.” Each tier is smaller than the one below so that the volume sets back as it rises off the ground. A gigantic gold sphere sits inside the uppermost openwork lattice tier quite like the dome atop the Cologne Glass Pavilion, only smaller and spherical. It recalls Joseph Maria Olbrich’s Secession Building in Vienna as well as other historical domes. The tiers are ringed bands of floor- to-ceiling windows making the interior as filled with natural light as possible. Taut placed exposed steel columns on the outside and inside to advertise the pavilion’s function, as a showcase for steel construction. At each level, inscriptions wrap around the building. The inscriptions list steel structures like bridges and factories and also list the names of professional steelworkers groups like the Steel Mill Association. In plan, the monument is symmetrical and centrally organized with an inner space surrounded by a ring of open space. The structure therefore anticipates the Cologne Pavilion in several formal moves.
Figure 2: Monument to Steel (1913)
19 Kai Gutschow, “From Object to Installation in Bruno Taut’s Exhibit Pavilions,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 59, Issue 4, May 2006, 63-71.
Adolf Behne acknowledges Taut’s monument design for its appeal
to the emotions, “innovative approach,” use of primal forms and reliance on inner fantasy.20 In spite of Behne’s opinion, the monument uses familiar forms albeit in a strange arrangement. It is in his recognition of the debt Taut owes to fantasy that Behne’s appraisal is most useful; in its use of the octagonal plan, stacked and set back layers, and expressed steel, the monument departs from conventional form-making and shows that Taut is searching for a new formal language. Figure 3: Glass Pavilion, Cologne Werkbund Exhibition (1914)
Taut’s breakthrough project was the 1914 Glass House designed in collaboration with the German mystical writer and pacifist Paul Scheerbart.21 Taut had met Scheerbart through Gottfried Heinersdorff, who was the Artistic Head of the Glasmalerei-Werkstaetten, Puhl and Wagner, Berlin.22 Both men were involved in Der Sturm, one of the important prewar avant-garde movements in Germany. A central feature of Der Sturm was the search for new social and artistic forms as well as new purpose for both society and art.
Taut found Scheerbart’s philosophy attractive on many levels and would be influenced by the older man throughout his career. The Glass Pavilion was a quasi-mystical construction that celebrated glass as an
20 Adolf Behne, “Das Monument des Eisens,” Allgemeiner Beobachter 3, no. 12, October 1913, 167; Behne, “Das Monument des Eisens,” Kunstgewerbeblatt, 25, no. 5, February 1914, 86-88. 21 Paul Scheerbarts Briefe von 1913-1914 an Gottfried Heinersdorff, Bruno Taut und Herwarth Walden ed. Leo Ikelaar (Paderborn: Igel, 1996). 22 Bruno Taut: 1880-1938 Architekt zwischen Tradition u. Avantgarde, 299.
architectural material and, with its coloured glass pieces, harkened back to the stained glass of the Gothic cathedral. Whether Taut became a pacifist because of Scheerbart or was attracted to Scheerbart in part because of his strong pacifist views is not clear, but the two were both vehemently anti- war.
The ideas driving the design of the Glass Pavilion had utopian ambitions, as Paul Scheerbart’s rhyming couplets demonstrate: “Coloured glass destroys hatred,” “Glass brings us the new time: brick culture only makes us sorry.” Although groundbreaking in many ways the pavilion is also awkward. Its use of coloured glass on as many surfaces as possible and its unusual formal resolution mark the pavilion as a unique project for the time that demonstrates, as Taut claimed, the as-yet unexplored possibilities inherent in glass construction.23 But when compared with the compositional freedoms of the fine art Taut admired, the pavilion seems timid. It is a perfect circle, symmetrical, static, and centrally focused. The oddly shaped dome sits uncomfortably on the reinforced concrete frame below, which has a similarly disjunctive relationship to the concrete base. While the form is unusual, it still remains stubbornly in the realm of a familiar form recalling cathedrals, Orthodox churches, and mosques. This is likely partly because of the real and obvious constraints associated with any architectural design project but also, perhaps, because Taut could not extricate himself from known forms.
Taut’s short piece, “War Ceremony,” from 1915, reveals a shift in his thinking during the war. In the essay, he makes a very persuasive argument against the design and construction of war monuments as a legitimate way for architects to occupy themselves during the war in favour of the design and construction of useful…
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